It’s the end of the road for Tim Winton. This is his last interview, after two months in Australia promoting his 29th book, The Shepherd’s Hut, and flying around the country for a sold-out speaking tour about toxic masculinity. The night before our meeting in Melbourne, he was in Sydney for the premiere of Breath, a movie version of his coming-of-age surfing novel directed by the actor Simon Baker. Tomorrow he’s going home at last, to a tiny town he prefers not to name in interviews, two hours north of Perth.

Winton is gracious with his time, given his exhaustion and that he really doesn’t like the publicity circuit. He is protective of his life away from being Tim Winton, four-time winner of Australia’s most prominent literary award, the Miles Franklin. By literary standards, he is astonishingly popular, a writer of dark fiction who gets asked for autographs on the street.

About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny

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“You’re the only thing that’s standing between me and freedom,” he says with a smile, describing himself as a horse in a paddock waiting to go home: “Any fence I can’t jump I’m just going to run through.”

For the last couple of months, Winton has being venturing out of his domestic bliss and he has caused a fuss. At 57, he’s recognisably the same Winton, with his straggly surf-bleached hair, his loose jeans and T-shirt. He’s in company, he says, so he’s wearing shoes.

But he has done something he has never done before and completed a 10-city tour, where people paid up to $50 (£28) to hear him talk about an issue that The Shepherd’s Hut raises, even though Winton loathes worthy-cause writing: the toxicity of patriarchy, not only for women but for men and boys.

Winton decided to give the tour, called Tender Hearts, Sons of Brutes, because he knew The Shepherd’s Hut was being published in the middle of the #MeToo moment, a cultural upheaval that is throwing up deep questions about gender relations.

“I didn’t write the book as a vehicle to talk about it,” he says. “I wrote the book the same way I write all the books: just for play, to find out, to make a story and as an excuse to write about landscapes that I love and the people who come out of those landscapes.”

His antihero is Jaxie Clackton, barely 15, raised amid violence and indifference in a small town in Western Australia. His father – “Captain Wankbag” as Jaxie calls him – is physically and verbally violent towards the boy and his mother. Every man in Jaxie’s life has modelled a deformed version of masculinity; its violence, self-hatred, harshness, and its contempt for women. Jaxie is profane, casually sexist and racist, and he bullies kids at school. He is the “fruit of misogyny”, says Winton.

Why should men have to apologise for writing about men?

Jaxie’s mother has died from cancer and, when his father dies in a gruesome way, the damaged adolescent starts walking north, surviving for a time on his own. Only when he meets ex-priest Fintan MacGillis, living alone on the barren salt plains of Western Australia, does he sense the possibility of another way to live, a glimpse of humanity and decency.

Winton’s themes often revolve around damaged men and yearning boys but this time he has chosen to address it explicitly. “The thing that’s achingly obvious is that men aren’t really stepping up and lifting their end of the log,” he says of the pervasiveness of systemic misogyny. “I’m not an expert. I’m not in the sociological field and I haven’t got a PhD in gender studies. I was offering up a few observations, thinking aloud, really.”

Winton is praised for the poetry of his prose, and he speaks in images, too, about when he first noticed that women’s lives were different. He would walk home at night and see women who were afraid, tensing up at his presence and scrambling inside their handbags.

It’s like racism, he says: “If you’re a white middle-class person, racism isn’t a big part of your life. It’s hard to detect because you’re never on the receiving end of it. You have to exercise a fair bit of moral imagination and a degree of curiosity and research to pick it out.”

In the same way, many men can’t comprehend what is it like to navigate life as a woman. “We can talk about unexamined privilege but it’s often just at the simplest level,” Winton says. “You recognise that at a certain point your day’s half as hard as a lot of women’s days, regardless of class or whatever else.”

Winton uses the terminology of the moment: toxic masculinity, male privilege, domestic terrorism. Nothing he is saying is new and he knows that, and is sensitive to another term – “mansplaining”. The #MeToo phenomenon is full of complexity, pushback and demands from some women for men to just shut up and listen.

“There’s no question I was nervous about it, because I knew the conversation had become quite manicky in the last five or six months,” Winton says. “To be a bloke piping up in the middle of that – I have 500,000 gallons of Avgas and I’m about to light up a fag.”

As laudable as it is for someone like Winton to speak without equivocation, it is curious, too, because he has been accused of sexism in his novels. His books have been translated into 28 languages and twice shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. His breakthrough came in 1991 with Cloudstreet, a book that changed everything for Winton: it has sold well over 200,000 copies in Australia alone and hauled him from his working-class roots up into the upper-middle classes.

Yet Cloudstreet and his other novels have been criticised by some as being so obsessed with damaged men and adolescent boys that female characters are reduced to stereotypes or foils for male troubles. Nicolle Flint, now a Liberal MP, wrote a column for Fairfax a few years ago about how bothersome she found many of Winton’s characters. He “presents the classic Madonna-whore, saintly-mother-versus-fallen-woman stereotype”, Flint wrote.

More recently, Holly Isemonger wrote in the Lifted Brow about her love of surfing and how women have no place in Winton’s image of the sport: “Australia hasn’t questioned the repercussions of taking this masculine nostalgia as our most adored national narrative.”

If #MeToo can’t be subject to analysis and criticism, what is it?

“If misogyny wasn’t offensive to me as a behaviour and as a systemic problem, then I probably wouldn’t be affected by being called a misogynist,” he says. “If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t care. But if those things mean something to you, and you get smeared with that, it stings a bit. But I’m perfectly aware there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The feminist critiques have “puzzled me a bit and anything I say is going to sound defensive, so where can I go there?

“When you’ve been raised by strong women, when the biggest characters in your life have been strong women, when you’re interested in women, it’s a little bewildering to have to cop that … A lot of the time, I wonder if I’m just being convicted of insufficient valorisation of the women characters. Given the world that I’m describing, to load it on any harder would be not just virtue signalling, it would be dishonest.

“I’m writing outside the enclave of the inner city, and what’s happening in the world that I’m seeing is that women are having a harder trajectory than men. And if there has to be a body count, does nobody seem to notice that most of the men in my books are doing badly?

“In that sense, it’s kind of hard to make sense of the complaints, all these damaged males doing terrible things to each other and to their women. If I’m going to be a propagandist and using art as an instrument, then I can write about what life should be, or what life could be, and prosecute a case, but that’s not what a novelist does; that’s what a columnist does.”

Winton finds the idea that male writers should apologise for being interested in the male experience offensive. Women writers “don’t have quotas in their fiction about making sure they get enough men characters”, he says. “No one’s policing women’s fiction for lazy tropes about male behaviour or male characteristics. There’s no reciprocity there but as soon as I say that I sound like I’m bleating, so I never said it.

“Why should men have to apologise for writing about men in the same way? I never apologised for being Australian writing about Australians. I never apologised about being a West Australian writing to a largely indifferent Australia about my no-account people in my no-account place.”

As for #MeToo, Winton is supportive but he won’t give it a free pass. “If #MeToo can’t be subject to analysis and criticism, what is it? Is it some sort of monolithic thing beyond reproach? If it’s a human construct, with people struggling towards something, everything about it has to be up for discussion.”

It’s a full-blooded response from someone who is very aware of feminism, celebrates the changes it has brought to women’s lives and mourns that so many men are imprisoned by old rules about what a man must be. Perhaps Winton is damned if he talks about feminism and damned if he doesn’t. Perhaps he will never say quite the right thing, even though his is a powerful and popular voice. Perhaps it irks some women that he wants to talk about how misogyny is a sign of something wrong in masculinity – although he is at pains to point out that its primary victims are women.

“The only way I can think about selling this as an idea emotionally to my brothers is to [say] we’re missing out, too,” he says, “and if you shut up and relent and surrender and listen, there’s something in it for you.”

He is ready to go home now. The Shepherd’s Hut has topped the book charts in Australia, having sold some 50,000 copies in its first two months. Now he wants to return to his other life, to his home just outside a town of 1,800 people where he lives with his wife, Denise, and where nobody cares that he’s the writer Tim Winton, and where many of his friends never read his books. He surfs most days and still “works like a tradie”, as he puts it. But he is not so frenetic or driven as he was in his 20s, writing 10 books in a decade until he broke through with Cloudstreet.

“I’m 57, I shouldn’t have to be hurtling along at the pace that I was,” he says. “That stuff costs you. Ten books in your 20s, that costs in the end. I’m glad I had it, and my life’s been so exceptional that if there’s no other books, if I can never write one, or if I write them and find out that they’re crap, what can I do but just say, ‘Fair enough’? Who could get a better run than me?”

• The Shepherd’s Hut is published in Australia and New Zealand by Penguin Random House, in the US by Farrar Straus & Giroux and in the UK by Picador (£14.99, or £12.74 from the Guardian Bookshop). Breath is on limited release in US cinemas now

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